Dessert or Desert? || Natsume and Caitlin
It wasn't Natsume's first trip to Unova. Much the contrary, she'd visited Virbank numerous times during the course of her ongoing acting career. It made the task she had in mind - catching new Pokemon - that much easier. She already had a map, reliable transportation, and knowledge of the indigenous Pokemon. She was here specifically to catch Sigilyph. She had had her eye on the Pokemon for a while now and had already planned to go directly to the Desert Resort in order to find one. In her head this trip wouldn't take long at all.
During her stay in Hoenn, the psychic had been sidetracked from the get-go. First there had been shopping. That alone had taken up a quarter of the time she spent in the foreign region. She had also met a member of the Elite Four and challenged a couple of gyms during her travels. Natsume had gone at such a leisurely pace that by the time she caught her Ralts, three weeks had passed. While it was exactly the vacation she felt she needed, she knew that she couldn't spend much more time away from her gym - not a month per region at the very least.
This, of course, was easier said or in her case thought than done. Her travels to Virbank had only rarely led her to the mainland of Unova and her map had not prepared her for the sprawling urban streets of Castelia. Natsume was used to Saffron, which was by no means a small city, but it paled in comparison to the towering skyscrapers here. She felt the city would be a lot less disorienting if it weren't for all the people running about, but the flow clearly never ceased. Focusing, she managed to stumble out onto Route 4 with only minor bruises, a slight dizzy sensation, and a few hours less time left in the day.
Out of the frying pan and into the... sand? Even after the urbanization in the area, there were erratic gusts of wind that swept sand up into the air and threatened to overwhelm the senses - more specifically, the psychic's eyes. Raising an arm, Natsume tried to block the sand and peered out around one of her bracelets. For all her focus and mental training, she really wish she had prepared in more simple ways. A coat, a scarf, or even just a hat would have done her a lot of good at the moment. However, she wasn't going to pull a Hoenn and go back to spend her time shopping for those things. Instead, the gym leader braced herself and followed the path out to the Desert Resort.
It was slow going and, even with a paved road to follow, she was starting to get frustrated. If the gusts were consistent, she felt she could have managed it. There was nothing consistent about it; one time the wind had died down long enough that she thought it was over, just to get a blast of sand in her face. Closing her eyes, Natsume lowered her arm to her side to pull out a Pokeball. Using her telekinesis, she lifted the object into the air and triggered the locking mechanism. Once the light cleared, her Slowking lifted his head and she pulled the empty Pokeball back to her hand. With a silent command, the almost oblivious looking Pokemon gave a labored nod. Slow! KING! A blue screen of light enveloped both trainer and Pokemon as the duo had agreed to use Barrier.
Opening her eyes, she gave a mental compliment to her Pokemon and patted it on the back. Now Natsume felt like she could see - and just in time. The duo was approaching the entrance to the Desert Resort and the sandstorm was picking up in power the closer they got. In the distance, she could see a trainer with long hair entering the gatehouse with what looked like a -- Sigilyph? The psychic's gut instinct told her that this trainer might be able to give her some pointers to find one of the avian Pokemon or what the best method to catch one was. "Come on," she said to the Slowking. "We need to go catch up with that trainer."
